Books: Corn-Squeeze Artist

WATER OF LIFE (621 pp.]Henry Morton RobinsonSimon &
Schuster ($5.95).

This is a three-generation novel in which the generation is ceaseless,
the dialogue deathless, and the drink strong at all times. Novelist
Robinson populates his pages with gamblers, gypsies, whores,
cutpurses, counterfeiters, country maidens, Mafia men. Harvard
professors, necrophiles, lesbians, and good, honest Indiana farmers.
He afflicts them variously with lust, greed, chronic childbirth,
madness, lung surgery and death by water, gunshot, prolonged beating
and Addison's disease. As it is customary for costume novelists to concern themselves also with
a certain amount...